A New Fundamentalism?

Joe Rigney's recent talk Thou Shalt Not Do a Christendom is worth your time in full. One section was especially helpful to me. In it, Rigney lists the objections that routinely come up whenever Christians start talking seriously about shaping public life and culture. If you've been in this conversation, you've probably heard most of them:

1. The therapeutic objection: "Exercising power is not the way of Jesus."
2. The pietistic objection: "Jesus said my kingdom is not of this world."
3. The heavenly homeland objection: "My citizenship is in heaven. I don't have ancestral lands. My homeland is in heaven."
4. The academic objection: "You're not allowed to use the Christian tradition that way. We're not going back."
5. The imbalance objection: "I think you're emphasizing politics and culture too much."
6. The third way objection: "Jesus is neither left nor right. He's not the donkey or the elephant. He's the lamb."
7. The nuance objection: "We have to be nuanced. This is very complicated."
8. The contrast objection: "We're not called to win the culture. We're called to love our neighbor." Or: "Let's be known for what we're for, not for what we're against."
9. The respectability objection: "Be careful. The world is watching. We want to sit at that table."
10. The longhouse objection: "This sounds scary. I'm very concerned."
11. The premillennial objection: "We lose down here."
12. The postmillennial objection: "Christendom only comes from the bottom up, so just sit back and ride the waves. It's just going to happen on its own."

Something about my conversations with people who use these slogans to criticize my approach feels familiar. It reminds me of fundamentalism, the fundamentalism I was exposed to as a child.

Fundamentalism did not begin as a collection of slogans. In 1910, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. affirmed five "essential and necessary" articles of faith. They were grounded in the Westminster Standards, and the Assembly said plainly that the list was not complete: "Others are equally so." Applying those fundamentals also took a measure of nuance.

The early movement had room for that nuance. As John Stackhouse argued in a 2022 article in Christian Scholar's Review, the essays collected in The Fundamentals (1910–15) accepted a certain kind of reverent, God-fearing higher criticism as potentially legitimate. They also allowed that evolution might be a means God used.

Over time, however, much of fundamentalism suffered a kind of brain rot. The fundamentals became mere slogans that spawned even cruder constructions that carried extremely narrow meanings, and in that form they became shibboleths.

Thought Terminating Cliches

Every one of the twelve statements Rigney lists has value and most have real biblical legitimacy. Jesus did say his kingdom is not of this world. Our citizenship is in heaven. We are called to love our neighbor. Some questions really are complicated. I don't want to throw any of that away.

My concern is how these statements are almost always used. They work the way the worst of fundamentalism worked. The philosopher Nicholas Shackel gave this move a name: the "motte and bailey." A medieval motte was a defensible tower, and the bailey was the more desirable land around it. In an argument, the bailey is the conclusion someone actually wants. Shackel calls it "desirable to its proponent but only lightly defensible." The motte is "the defensible but undesired position to which one retreats when hard pressed."

Take "my kingdom is not of this world." The motte is that Jesus said it, and it's true. The bailey is that Christians therefore shouldn't try to shape the laws and culture of the place where they live. When the bailey is challenged, the speaker retreats to the motte. Who could argue with Jesus? Then the conversation ends, and the bailey quietly stays in place, unexamined.

That is what made the old fundamentalism so frustrating. Robert Jay Lifton, who studied thought reform, described language in which "the most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed. These become the start and finish of any ideological analysis." He called them thought-terminating clichés. I grew up around phrases like that. They didn't open a conversation; they settled it. Today's slogans sound gentler and more humble than the old ones, but they do the same job.

Possible Explanations

I've really tried to understand why people capable of real nuance and abstract thought have become so dependent on thought-terminating clichés in this particular area of discussion. I don't have a final answer, but I have some guesses.

The first has to do with our tools. Marshall McLuhan's insight is usually summed up in a line from his friend John Culkin: "We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us." Social media is a tool, and it has shaped us. It has obviously shortened our attention spans. It has also changed what gets rewarded. A careful argument earns a few likes. A sharp slogan earns hundreds. These platforms pay out most generously for the short, quotable line, and so we learn to harvest that reward.

If McLuhan is right, that training doesn't stay online. The habits our tools build into us show up in how we argue at the dinner table, in church, and in conversations with friends. We reach for the line that worked before, because it worked before.

There's an obvious connection between our attention spans and the tools we use every day. Extended, nuanced arguments take a lot of mental effort. Keywords don't. We lean on thought-terminating clichés for all sorts of reasons, but one of them is simply that thinking is hard work.

An Older Explanation

That brings me to a principle I've come to see, now in my fifties, as nearly fail-proof. The Bible piles up a great deal of evidence against a handful of basic sins that we tend to assume are not at work in ourselves or in the people we're talking to: laziness, fear, and anger.

Laziness

Thinking well is especially difficult when you're a pastor. A fundamental part of the job is the ongoing, continual care of a highly complex system run largely by volunteers, which is its own extraordinarily sophisticated kind of management. So I wouldn't discount simple laziness as an explanation, for two reasons. First, I know how hard it is to think well. Second, I know how much thinking I'm already required to do as a pastor. And the Bible talks a great deal about laziness, because it's a real problem.

Fear

Moving from laziness, we find another problem the Scriptures address continually: fear. Scripture has a lot to say about laziness, but far more to say about fear. It is probably not a coincidence that as the stakes and the cost of political involvement have risen, the number of voices throwing thought-terminating clichés at the troublemakers has risen too.

I'll be honest: I struggle to know how to apply the obvious biblical message, that people struggle with fear, without assigning motives to those who disagree with me. What I look for is evidence of general Christian bravery in other areas of their lives, apart from the issues we're discussing. I'll write more about fear in a future article on why cowardice appears in the list in Revelation 21.

Anger

As for anger, I think of George Marsden's line that a fundamentalist is "an evangelical who is angry about something." What often gets lost in the history of the fundamentalists is that they were angry because they were hurt. Many of them had been pushed out of the denominations, schools and institutions they had built, and they felt mistreated. Their anger had a history.

Here's the reality. Especially in the couple of years after COVID, many of the pastors who now reach for these clichés experienced a level of criticism they hadn't faced in a long time. Some of it was warranted and some of it wasn't. Some of it was expressed in a godly way and some of it wasn't. At the risk of countering their clichés with one of my own, it's worth remembering that hurt people hurt people.

Are any of these reasons satisfactory explanations? I don't know. But the Bible teaches me to treat these issues as relevant background signals, worth exploring beyond the so-called presenting problem. In the end, the responsibility for checking them belongs to every individual in the conversation, and Jesus tells us to begin by taking the log out of our own eye (Matthew 7:3–5).

The Self Own of Secondary Separation

There's one more feature of fundamentalism worth naming, because it has made a quiet comeback. Fundamentalists practiced "secondary separation." It wasn't enough to separate from false teachers. You also had to separate from faithful believers who refused to separate from them. The classic case came in the 1950s, when many fundamentalists broke with Billy Graham. They had no quarrel with his gospel. Their objection was that he let theological liberals sit on the platforms of his crusades. Guilt traveled by association, and so did suspicion.

The secondary separation argument has always been a bit of a self-own in my opinion. In order for a person to make that argument with sincerity, they have to acknowledge that they are themselves prone to being mimetically duped or that they judge their opponent to be (see Matthew 7:3-5).

Or they have to be hurt or angry or fearful or lazy or trained by the tools they use to see every retweet and quote in a way that simply is not reflective of how things are done in the real world.